Wherein we are not warful.

• 3:36 A slight correction about the etymology of “magic”
• 5:55 Linguistics Thing Of The Day: Verb voice, aka diathesis
• 23:01 Question 1: I [once] initially used "tiring" to describe someone, and then realized it didn't quite fit right, so I used "tiresome" instead. [T]hose should basically mean the same thing, and I can't [put the difference into words, but] they feel very different. How do words develop different connotations like that? / does the “-eous” suffix mean that something just has a flavor or hue of a thing but isn’t actually the thing? (Flavor/hue may not be the right words but I don’t remember what the correct term is) Like how “rightful” and “righteous” are not the same. I haven’t looked up the definition of “beauteous”, but I think it does mean something different from “beautiful”.
• 35:39 Question 2: I saw this screenshot of a tumblr post and it got me wondering. The grammar in the dialogue might be trying to suggest that the cavemen's language is "primitive", and we could imagine that the scene is set in a time when (spoken) language was still very much in development compared to what it is today. With that in mind, do you think they would have opted to use consonant clusters like gl, gr, and rg in their names? Are those (especially gl) common across languages spoken today (idk what to look for in WALS...)? When do you think they first appeared in a spoken language? What do we know about the sounds (phonemes?) our ancestors could produce; which likely came first and which ones are more recent?
• 51:30 Question 3: "Optimality Theory is bullshit." Discuss.
• 1:01:28 The puzzler: What is 3/7 chicken, 2/3 cat, and 2/4 goat?

• If you are a patient, you are experiencing a problem; if you are being patient, you are probably also experiencing a problem
• “Collectivity” is not a word people know
• Etymology is not destiny
• English “caveman speak” relies heavily on phonesthemes
• Human babies are scientifically proven to evolve into human adults
• Sooner or later, M shows up
• Eli is not an optimality theorist (because he thinks optimality theory is bullshit)
• Eli apologizes to optimality theorists for calling their thing bullshit
• Sarah fails to correctly divide a word into two-letter units

• Lexical gaps in English
• Germanic / French / Latinate word triplets in English and it comes up here too
• Collectivity is technically a word, and is a synonym of collectiveness
• Per our belovèd Etymonline, “[Flour] also was spelled flower until flour became the accepted form c. 1830 to end confusion.” It doesn’t specify why it became the accepted form, but Webster’s “A Compendious Dictionary of the English Language” was published in 1806 and his “American Dictionary of the English Language” was published in 1828, so the timing would actually fit!
• IPA pulmonic consonant charts
• This was cut during editing, but we did discuss how there are many grayed out squares in the IPA for physically impossible sounds
• Optimality Theory

Send your questions (text or voice memo) to questions@linguisticsafterdark.com, or find us as @lxadpodcast on Twitter, Instagram, and Facebook.

Linguistics After Dark is produced by Emfozzing Enterprises. Audio editing is done by Luca, and show notes and transcriptions are a team effort. Our music is "Covert Affair" by Kevin MacLeod.

And until next time… if you weren’t consciously aware of your tongue in your mouth, now you are :)

Wherein we are not already in textbooks.

Jump right to:

• 2:25 Linguistics Thing Of The Day: Ergativity
• 25:50 Some people would say “historic moment” or “electric field”; others seem to say “historical moment” or “electrical field”. Is there any study of this difference[, and] how would you describe [it]? I usually call it whether people use nouns adjectivally, but that may not be accurate or precise. / "Magic" is a noun, its adjective form is "magical," and its adverb form is "magically." "Tragic," on the other hand, is an adjective, its noun form is "tragedy," and its adverb form is "tragically." Why aren't "tragic" and "magic" the same part of speech? should we make them the same part of speech? if so, do we drop "tragedy" and make "tragic" the noun and re-introduce "tragical" as an adjective? or do we invent the word "magedy" and get rid of "magical"?
• 39:47 How to learn a relatively obscure language without going to the country it is spoken in? How does it compare to learning a dead language?
• 52:56 If I'm trapped in the distant past with anatomically modern humans armed only with Ryan North's book "How To Invent Nearly Everything", then I plan to follow his recommendation to 'invent' writing (after spoken language, of course). What features should I keep in mind when devising an alphabet for my ancient new friends, and what might the result look like?
• 1:08:22 The puzzler: The name of what widely spoken language consists of four consecutive US state postal abbreviations?

Covered in this episode:

• Agents, patients, doers, subjects, objects, and other words that don’t necessarily refer to the topic of a sentence
• Part-of-speech abbreviations that aren’t short for anything
• Sports commentators’ ongoing collective attempt to make nonce ergativity happen
• Walkers and standees?
• Agent-patient fluidity and hierarchies in languages like Chickasaw and Dyirbal
• [Regina George voice] Stop trying to make “magedy” happen
• If something ends in -al, it’s already in textbooks
• Linguists don’t believe in adverbs, because they’re the same thing as adjectives (except when they’re not, but really they are)
• Part-of-speech abbreviations that aren’t short for anything (again)
• How to study a language depends on why you want to know it in the first place
• Latin students can’t ask for help if their car breaks down
• The Latin alphabet is really great for Latin! Because it’s the Latin alphabet, which was invented for Latin!
• Sarah strongly encourages writing vowels and strong discourages writing boustrophedon

Links and other post-show thoughts:

• Eli highly recommends “Describing Morphosyntax: A Guide for Field Linguists” by Thomas E. Payne
• The Chickasaw people (and thus their language) are traditionally from northern Mississippi, northern Alabama, western Tennessee, and southwestern Kentucky. Dyirbal is spoken in northern Queensland in Australia.
• Eli also mentioned “Women, Fire, and Dangerous Things: What Categories Reveal about the Mind” by George Lakoff
• The etymology of “magic”
• “Verbing weirds language”: Calvin & Hobbes, January 25, 1993
• XKCD #356: Nerdsniping
• Lang-8 no longer takes new users but they have an app called HiNative
• Say Something In has courses in Welsh, Cornish, Manx, Dutch, and Spanish, for native English speakers
• The Scots Wikipedia issue
• Ryan North's book “How To Invent Nearly Everything”
• Canadian Aboriginal syllabics
• The origin of Hangul

Ask us questions:

Send your questions (text or voice memo) to questions@linguisticsafterdark.com, or find us as @lxadpodcast on Twitter, Instagram, and Facebook.

Credits:

Linguistics After Dark is produced by Emfozzing Enterprises. Eli edits, Jenny wrangles questions, and show notes and transcriptions are a team effort. Our music is "Covert Affair" by Kevin MacLeod.

And until next time… if you weren’t consciously aware of your tongue in your mouth, now you are :)